Video games also have long had us infiltrating Nazi bases for decades now, but Paradise Lost requires a more hardened way compared to all-guns blazing action of Wolfenstein or even Sniper Elite. Its underground blossom setting is nearly completely desolate from the outset of the narrative, so the closest you will ever come to getting a gun is if you're having a rifle through filing cabinets for clues to determine exactly what fate befell its inhabitants. Yet while I researched the often troubling depths of Paradise Lost's Swastika-adorned subterranea having a continual sense of morbid fascination, its frustratingly sparse approach to storytelling meant my emotional investment in the plight of its figures remained eternally stranded on the surface.
In Paradise Lost's alternate history setting, World War II continued to 1960, allowing sufficient time to allow the Nazis to develop powerful nuclear weapons in subterranean bunker facilities. Finally, under pressure in the usa and Soviets, the Nazis unleashed a nuclear holocaust and retreated underground, reducing the whole European continent to a uninhabitable wasteland. Paradise Lost's story picks up twenty decades after, when a 12-year-old Polish survivor named Szymon enters these bunkers searching for a mysterious man who knew his late mother, and I felt a direct pull to learn exactly what or who was lurking below.
The spooky descent in to Paradise Lost's cavernous expanse initially gives the impression that you're in for some kind of bunker-bound BioShock, and that feeling is reinforced once Szymon soon strikes up a yearlong radio connection with Ewa, that plays with an Atlas-style role in assisting Szymon navigate through each area whilst keeping her true motivations unclear. However there are no Splicers or Big Daddies to battle as you pick through the remains of Paradise Lost's deserted dystopia, also for the most part your activities are rather basic and limited to studying letters, listening to audio logs, also pulling levers to electricity any dormant mechanisms that impede your path forward.
Out of your interactions with Ewa, which can be reasonably engaging but generally limited to the intercom microphones you come upon every once in a while, you are effectively left alone to attempt to piece together the story by scouring each hall and office for so much information as possible. Definitely the most stimulating approach to consume a little the bunker's backstory is the handful of occasions you have access to a archaic E-V-E monitor terminal, that supplies you with shadowy box-style recordings of the last moments of activity in any particular area. E-V-E is the AI that controls the bunker's agricultural and security methods, among other things, and it is strangely fascinating to watch a crucial moment in this place's history unfold around the terminal screen in a flurry of human-tracking warmth maps and catastrophe management probability calculations.
Curiously, these memory sequences are still interactive, giving you control where troops have been set up over the course of a conflict between the Nazis and members of the Poland Underground Condition, for instance. These choices helped to keep me engaged in the E-V-E interactions plus they do have slight implications for Szymon's story, but I could never really understand how I was able to control events that had taken place. I suppose I must have missed that memo, and believe me when I say I read completely every memo I could get my hands on.

In fact I hunted outside and pored over every bit of information that I could find in Paradise Lost, and I still don't feel as though I knew enough about the people on either side of its central battle to really care about its outcome. At one point Ewa insists that Szymon investigates the cells in which Polish women were held for research experiments in eugenics, so as to pay respect to their individual stories. But there is just so much you are able to find out when the only interactive object in one mobile is a used up punch card and another has nothing but a half-finished crossword mystery, rendering it hard to contact their battle.
Paradise Lost fails to take whole advantage of its own gripping premise along with the haunting atmosphere of its setting, falling short of this standard set by additional first-person narrative experiences released in the past few decades. It's much less detail-rich as Gone Home, the radio-based relationship between its two leads never reaches the identical amount of intimacy as Firewatch, and also its storytelling is not nearly as inventive or interactive as that of What Remains of Edith Finch. the impossible quiz I admire the creativity that's become realising the architecture of its underground center, but I only wish the lack of narrative detail and personality development within it hadn't left me feeling warmer than the concrete corridor.